[admin_only] Improvements

International cup matches now give additional ranking points in comparison to national league or cup matches. These bonus points are higher depending on the importance of the competition, i.e. Europa League and Copa Sudamericana give you a smaller bonus than Champions League and Libertadores, which give you a smaller bonus than the Club World Cup. We probably need to have a complete manual page to demystify how the ranking points are calculated!

I’ve finally tracked down the bug where CPU teams where loaning players that they didn’t really need, and therefore were not using them in matches. If you have a player loaned to a CPU team and you see he is not being used you should call him back and loan list him again. Next time he gets a loan offer he will be much more likely to be used by the team who gets him, now that the problem is fixed.

The auto-generated in-game newspaper is now reborn with news about player movements (transfers, starting career, leaving club). The World News tab will show relevant player movements in the last 3 turns (or last 3 turns where at least one player moved). There is also a complete separate section now for Managers at Risk instead of displaying them at the bottom of the User Articles page.

The age in which players start losing skills will now vary between 31 and 34 depending on the age they reach their potential. Those reaching potential while still young will start losing skills at 31 and those reaching potential in the 30s will start losing skills at 34, with the other two profile types in between. It is important to notice that all existing players that are 31 and over OR that are already fully developed will still keep the current behaviour of starting to lose skills at 31, all the others will follow this new rule.

Players will now improve a higher number of attributes in a single improvement when younger and a lower number when older. Previously all player improvements gave them a random number of points between 1 and 6 (1 and 5 for goalkeepers), but now the earlier improvements are guaranteed to give them more (between 4 and 6 and then 3 and 5) and the later improvements will give them less (between 2 and 4 and finally between 1 and 3). The average number of points a player receives after all his improvements remain unchanged. This change is effective immediately for existing players as well, in proportion to the number of improvements left in his career.

The main goal of this change is to have better players than can be used as first team at a younger age, instead of relying solely on old players. This could also bring a new dynamic to the transfer market as managers may be willing to sell “not so old” players knowing they will have to wait less time to renew the squad.

You may have noticed some CPU teams have more than the limit of 40 players in their squads. This was due to a bug that has now been fixed, CPU teams will respect the same limit of players human managed teams have, even if it changes in the future. Of course that any teams currently above the limit will remain so until they sell their exceeding players, but they won’t be able to hire/loan additional players in the meantime.

You may want to keep an eye on free transfer list in countries that have inactive teams. From now on, inactive players will be gradually released to the free transfer of their team’s country throughout the season. That means inactive teams will always get a fresh batch of players when re-joining the game as well as having their money balance reset.

Two minor improvements: transfer prices and wages now have proper formatting when displayed in the team and player history ($n,nnn,nnn); negotiation failed messages now include the wage accepted by the player.